Debuted on 22 August 1990, "Pump Up the Volume" the coming-of-age teen drama film written and directed by Allan Moyle. The film stars Christian Slater, Scott Paulin, Ellen Greene, and Samantha Mathis. Despite positive critical response, the movie topped out at $11 million at the box office at the time.
The plot was this: high school student Mark Hunter lives in a sleepy suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, and broadcasts an FM pirate radio station from his parents' basement which functions as his sole outlet for his teenage angst and aggression. The station's theme song is "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen and there are glimpses of cassettes by alternative musicians such as The Jesus and Mary Chain, Camper Van Beethoven, Primal Scream, Soundgarden, Ice-T, Bad Brains, Concrete Blonde, Henry Rollins, and Pixies. By day, Mark is a loner who has difficulty socializing. By night, he become Happy Harry Hard-on or simply "Hard Harry", he expounds outsider views about problems with US society, expresses teen angst, and exposes the underhanded actions of the faculty. His audience grows from a handful of loyal listeners to the entire student body.
Depressed teenager Malcolm Kaiser writes to Harry seeking advice about committing suicide. Harry flippantly expresses disbelief that Malcolm is sincere, saying "Maybe you'll feel better tomorrow." The next day it is discovered that Malcolm committed suicide.
Fellow student Nora De Niro deduces that Mark is Hard Harry, and attempts to assuage the guilt he feels over Malcolm. The radio show becomes increasingly popular after Harry apologizes to Malcolm for not telling him not to follow through, and exhorts his listeners to confront their problems instead of surrendering to them through suicide. At the climax of his speech, overachieving student and consistent listener Paige Woodward jams her medals and accolades into a microwave, causing an explosion which injures her face.
Unrest at the school increases as students share bootleg tapes re-playing Harry's show. A meeting of faculty and parents concludes that the pirate DJ is responsible for the problems at the school. The police investigate, first cutting off Mark's access to his P.O. Box, and then cutting off the wireless phone that Mark had surreptitiously hooked up at a neighboring house. The FCC begins an investigation.
Mark decides to make a final broadcast. He installs his radio station in his mother's Jeep, creating a mobile transmitter so the FCC will have difficulty triangulating the radio signal. Nora drives while Mark broadcasts pursued by the police and the FCC.
Harry's broadcast is heard by the entire school who have gathered at the athletics field. Mark's father, school board commissioner Brian Hunter, confronts Principal Loretta Cresswood demanding to know why she systematically expelled students with low test scores. Cresswood insists they were losers and troublemakers and that she did it for the good of the school. Brian immediately suspends Cresswood.
The harmonizer Mark uses to disguise his voice breaks, and Mark decides to broadcast his final message as himself. The Jeep drives up to the crowd of students, and Mark tells them that the world belongs to them and that they should make their own future. He encourages them to "steal the air" and begin their own shows to put their thoughts and feelings out into the world. The police arrest Mark and Nora. As they are taken away, students shout their appreciation of "Harry". Mark turns to the students and tells them to "Talk hard!" As the film ends, the voices of students, and even one of the teachers, are heard introducing their own pirate radio shows.
It was one of the most important roles in the career of Christian Slater, who a year after starring in cult favorite Heathers, made noise with another movie that has since earned a loyal following. This movie arrived decades before podcasters started using their medium for raw confessionals, writer-director Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume featured Slater as a high school student and pirate radio DJ who causes a stir with candid commentary from his alter ego, "Hard Harry."
Moyle had written an unpublished novel that became the basis for Pump Up the Volume. John Cusack was considered for the role before it went to Slater. I’m quite surprised that it got greenlit when it did, but I doubt very much that it would get greenlit today,” says producer Rupert Harvey, who notes that New Line‘s later projects, including the Lord of the Rings franchise, were considerably more ambitious. Scott Paulin, Ellen Greene and Samantha Mathis rounded out the Pump Up cast, with Frank Zappa’s son Ahmet and Seth Green in supporting roles.
Harvey recalls a lengthy postproduction process to secure rights to songs from buzzy artists like Beastie Boys, Pixies, Ice-T and Soundgarden. The producer also remembers having to edit out some of the spicier language to achieve an R-rating for the film, which would later get attention for a scene involving Hard Harry simulating on-air masturbation.
"Pump Up the Volume" was a cult-movie that still resonates today, "Do you ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked-up?” as Christian Slater contemplates the fucked-up state of America in the Neighties. Now in 2025 when Donald Trump, a convicted felon, is president; people are being snatched off the streets and sent to foreign gulags; others are about to be kicked off of Medicaid. It’s easy to forget, prior to the internet, the feeling of being voiceless.
Is curiously to see how Pump Up The Volume predicted, and helped spark, a '90s teenage counterculture by simply depicting a shy teen with a ham radio who questions adult wisdom, challenges corruption at his school, blasts alternative music, and encourages his peers to “talk hard.”
Also contains one of the most enduring and influencer soundtracks. Leonard Cohen’s version of “Everybody Knows” which serves as the perfect song to open the movie with. Still the soundtrack does have a lot terrific tracks from The Pixies, Soundgarden, Cowboy Junkies and Sonic Youth highlighting alternative culture prior to the alternative breakout that Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) would ignite. Pump Up The Volume absolutely paved the way. “It felt like something was happening,” observes Samantha Mathis, who was 19 when she portrayed Mark’s poetry-writing love interest Nora in the film. “We were moving away from that synthesized sort of sound and moving into something edgier, and we had the dissonance of being around the ‘greed is good’ era of filmmaking and finance in the world. There was anger, and I thought Allan really tapped into that with this movie.”
Anthrax returned to the studio in the fall of 1989 with Mark Dodson (who produced the previous album, State of Euphoria) to start work on their fifth album. Recording of the album was difficult, with a large structure fire causing the band to lose more than $100,000 worth of gear and their rehearsal studio, on January 24, 1990. Following this disaster, the band moved to a different studio in late February of that year to finish work on the album.
The introduction to the album's sixth track "Intro to Reality" featured dialogue from an episode of The Twilight Zone called "Deaths-Head Revisited". "Keep It in the Family", "In My World", and "Belly of the Beast" were later re-recorded with the John Bush/Rob Caggiano line-up for the album The Greater of Two Evils. In the end, the band left the speed and agresivity in order to focus in the most progressive tunes and changed their topics for something more serious like time, life, death and hate.
The album proved to be a great commercial and critical success. The album broke into the top 20 on the Billboard 200, sold 500,000 units within a month of its release. The album has received critical acclaim since its release, and is regarded as a classic of Alternative Rock, alongside its predecessor, Nothing's Shocking.
Jane's Addiction's first album, Nothing's Shocking, received widespread critical acclaim and helped bring the group to prominence in Alternative Rock circles, despite underperforming commercially due to censorship.
The album is divided into halves. Tracks one through five are hard rock songs unrelated to each other, dealing with subjects such as stealing ("Been Caught Stealing") and anti-racism ("No One's Leaving") Tracks six through nine are in memoriam of singer Perry Farrell's deceased girlfriend Xiola Blue, who died of a heroin overdose in 1987 at the age of 18. "Three Days" and "Then She Did" bear a progressive rock influence, while "Of Course" carries a klezmer influence, with a prominent violin throughout. Eric Avery refused to play bass on "Of Course" out of resentment from being told what to play on other songs.
Recording engineer and guitar tech Ronnie S. Champagne, who would later confess that Farrell had a tendency to dictate the other members' parts during the recording of this album, ended up playing bass on the song instead. For his part, Avery would later admit regret not playing on the track.
"Then She Did" also chronicles Farrell's mother's suicide when he was four years old. "It's probably one of the reasons we were brought together…" remarked guitarist Dave Navarro, whose mother was murdered when he was a teenager. "I have memories of us being onstage together and, before we played 'Then She Did', Perry would grab me and say, 'Let's do this for our moms.' I still get chills when I think about it." "When you have something like that happen…" noted Farrell, "the better thing to do is to try to make some flowers grow out of it."
Two versions of the disc packaging were created: one album featured cover artwork of a papier mâché sculpture co-created by artist Casey Niccoli and singer Perry Farrell that visually referenced the Santería religion. The artwork was related to the song "Three Days" and includes male and female nudity.
The second cover has been called the "clean cover", and features only black text on a white background, listing the band name, album name, and the text of the First Amendment (the "freedom of speech" amendment, erroneously referred to as "Article 1", which in reality establishes the legislative branch of government) of the U.S. Constitution. The "clean cover" was created so the CD could be distributed in stores which refused to stock items with represented nudity.
The album was preceded by two singles, Stop! and Three Days, both released on August 2, 1990. The album was released on August 23, 1990, and proved to be a major commercial success, peaking at number 19 on the Billboard 200 and selling half a million copies within one month of its release.
The band broke up in 1991 after playing their last shows in Australia and Hawaii. "It's weird to be at the end of a cycle like that," remarked Avery, "having run the gamut of the usual 'rock story' from beginning to end: you get signed, get strung out, break up."
Florence + The Machine's drops their latest single, "Everybody Scream," just one day after the group confirmed its upcoming album of the same name out October 31. An interesting song in which front woman Florence Welch compares her life as a rock star to that of a cult leader in the chorus, singing, "Look at me run myself ragged / Blood on the stage / But how can I leave you when you screaming my name?" In the outro, Welch sings of witchcraft, spells, and injections before bemoaning, "The magic and the misery, madness and the mystery / Oh, what has it done to me?". The music video is just as unsettling. Directed by Autumn de Wilde, Welch follows a man riding backwards on a horse to a mansion seemingly overtaken by a cult. And yes, there is plenty of convulsing and eyes-rolling-back-into-heads to fuel the satanic-panic allegations.
